TAMPA — Target. Home Depot. Sony Pictures. The now infamous computer hacks infuriated consumers who had personal information compromised and Hollywood honchos who had embarrassing emails made public. But headline-grabbing computer intrusions are only a fraction of what is going on in the Wild West of cybercrime. According to Nextgov, the online resource for federal technology decision makers, energy giant BP faces 50,000 attempts at cyberintrusion a day. Read More….

For more information go to http://www.NationalCyberSecurity.com, http://www. GregoryDEvans.com, http://www.LocatePC.net or http://AmIHackerProof.com

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The Flashback Trojan could be on the wane despite infecting as many as 50,000 Apple computers in the UK at its peak, an analysis of the malware’s bot traffic by Kaspersky Lab has concluded.

Kaspersky’s peak infection numbers were 670,000, it said, a verification of the roughly 600,000 figure put out by security company Dr. Web last week. This still makes the incident the largest confirmed Mac malware outbreak yet recorded.

Using traffic ‘captured’ from the botnet by reverse engineering its Command and Control infrastructure, Kaspersky now estimates that roughly 300,000 of the infections were in the US, 94,000 in Canada, 47,000 in the UK, and almost 42,000 in Australia.

A clutch of countries in the EU, plus Mexico and Japan showed levels under 10,000 that probably reflect the website hosts used to spread it.

Exactly what is happening to the botnet now that it is famous is not clear. Kaspersky said it had seen an encouraging decline in the number of active bots to 237,000 over the Easter weekend, but this could reflect only those machines that were trying to connect to the CC servers during the measured time period.

Falling or not, the outbreak has alarmed Apple sufficiently for a company infamous for its tardy security response to issue a Java update for OS X v10.7 and Mac OS X v10.6, recommending that those running earlier versions simply disable the software altogether through the browser.

The company has also said it is planning to issue a tool to detect and remove Flashback (or ‘Flashfake’ as Kaspersky calls it).

Not everyone is impressed with Apple’s response and that criticism is likely to grow if Flashback turns out to be merely chapter one of a new age of (relative) Mac insecurity.

“Apple knew about this Java vulnerability for three months, and yet neglected to push through an update in all that time. The problem is exacerbated because up to now Apple has enjoyed a mythical reputation for being ‘malware free’,” said Kaspersky Lab’s chief security expert, Alexander Gostev.

“Too many users are unaware that their computers have been infected, or that there is a real threat to Mac security.”

As long predicted by experts working at security companies sometimes criticised for spreading FUD, Apple’s first major malware problem has come through a weakness routinely used to target Windows users, namely Java. Patching the vulnerability won’t make future attack less likely – as in the PC world new Java flaws keep appearing, demanding continuous vigilance.

Flashback, which can appear as the offer of a fake Flash update, has been around for more than six months although recent versions work using drive-by downloads requiring no user interaction.

IDG News Service - Facebook’s community forum was flooded during the Thanksgiving weekend with spam messages that advertised live streaming links for various sporting events.

The aggressive spamming campaign made it difficult for users to get technical assistance from their peers, which is the forum’s primary purpose.

It’s not clear if the accounts that posted the rogue messages were registered specifically for this purpose or were legitimate accounts compromised by spammers. However, judging by the publicly visible information on some of them, their involvement in this type of activity dates back weeks or even months.

One interesting aspect is that most of the affected users have installed what appear to be rogue apps with names such as “Notes” or “Discussion Board.” This opens up the possibility that their accounts were hijacked as a result of older spam campaigns that encouraged them to install those applications.

Even though this live-streaming spam has been going on for quite a while, the attack detected during the Thanksgiving weekend resulted in rogue topics appearing on the forum every single minute, according to a blog that tracks Facebook privacy and security issues.

This was possibly an attempt to take advantage of the fact that U.S. companies are usually understaffed during this period. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.

The spammed links directed users to websites offering subscription-based Internet TV services and despite what the rogue messages suggested, there was nothing free about their offers.

At the end of October, Facebook published an infographic, which said that spam represents less than 4% of content shared on the social networking website and affects under 0.5% of users on any given day. Of course, for Facebook 0.5% represents over 4 million users, which is a considerable number.

As usual, Facebook users should be wary of all unsolicited messages that ask them to install applications and should carefully review the permissions requested by those apps, as well as their popularity. Users should also immediately notify their friends if they see them spamming unusual messages.